Escalevator Action 1.2.1 is out. What is Escalevator Action?

I finally got around to uploading version 1.2.1 which I’ve been sitting on for a while. While I’m at it I might as well use this devlog to talk a bit about the game.

It’s probably fairly obvious but Escalevator Action is a sort of knock-off remake of Elevator Action. The idea came when I watching an episode of Game Grumps where they were playing old arcade games and made a joke about a modern HD remake of Elevator Action. This was 7 years ago. I uploaded it to GameDB which no longer exists as such. ModDB still has games on it including the old versions of Escalevator Action but the name GameDB is long gone. itch.io didn’t exist at this point as far as I’m aware.

I got Escalevator Action building in a semi-modern version of Unity and put the updated version up here because I like filling out weird American tax documents. I also decided to fix some things. In the last version on ModDB the bad guys have text to speech voice lines that start an external voice synthesizer whose volume can’t be easily controlled, so that was removed. It used to load the music out of files that could be replaced, I did away with that as it was fairly slow for a feature that wasn’t necessary. In this latest update I fixed a problem where the player would respawn inside the crushing hitbox on the bottom of and elevator and die instantly again. Now the player has 1 second of invulnerability after respawning. I should probably add this invulnerability when getting documents out of doors and traveling along escalators as there are some bugs with getting killed at the wrong point in those animations.

I’m not sure how much further development I will actually do with Escalevator Action, despite my wishes to fix some things. The whole Unity Thing happened only a short while after posting it to this site which has finally given me a better excuse to never use Unity again than “it’s yucky”. I have considered remaking the game in another engine but most likely I’ll focus on making new things. My continued support of this game was predominantly for the sake of posterity; I wanted a way for myself and others to play it without some of the annoying features of the old versions. That said, I came back to it after 7 years so maybe I’ll never escape the elevators, the escalators, or the action.